Maps We Never Drew: Chance

CHANCEBook One of Maps We Never DrewShekhar, a widower in his late fifties, arrives in Lisbon with two suitcases and no particular plan - just a life that no longer quite fit anywhere else. He isn't looking for company. He finds it anyway, in Kaavya, a UX designer half his age living one floor below, whose own solitude looks nothing like his but somehow rhymes with it.What begins as polite distance between neighbors becomes something neither of them planned for: an unlikely, unhurried friendship, built out of shared meals, small kindnesses, and the particular ease of two people who ask nothing of each other. But Shekhar is not as settled as he seems. A photograph on his shelf holds a name he hasn't spoken in decades - Aarti, the woman he loved before his life became the life he actually lived.He might have gone on like this indefinitely - Lisbon quietly becoming home, the question quietly staying buried - if not for Kaavya. It's her friendship, her questions, that finally push him toward the one he's spent thirty years avoiding: what happened to her? And what would it mean, after all this time, to go looking?Chance is the first book in the Maps We Never Drew trilogy - a quiet, tender story about the friendships we don't plan for, the years we carry in silence, and the sheer chance of a stranger who makes the impossible feel possible.